Preview: September 2015 Update

Introducing Strength Testing and Simulation

As a valuable member of the Fusion 360 community, we want to make sure you’re always in the loop of our latest and greatest. After all, these updates exist thanks to your feedback and requests! The major focus for this update is around testing and simulation of your designs. You will soon find a workspace labeled “SIM” under the workspace switcher where you will be able to choose from two types of simulation studies: Static Stress and Modal Frequencies. Check out this preview video to get a sneek peak at what to expect.

Static Stress will allow you to run single and/or multi-body linear static analysis. Constrain an area of the model, put a load on it, and see how that load will affect the design and determine what part of the design is more prone to fail.

Modal Frequencies will allow you to see the natural vibration frequencies of your design and how much deformation will occur when it is subjected to a specific frequency.

Some of the major features in the Simulation workspace will allow you to:

Set up adaptive mesh refinement

Define degrees of freedom and contact behavior

Assign and override materials for testing

Solve locally (cloud solve is in the works)

Toggle results threshold in real-time

Animate results to see deformation in real-time

Generate convergence charts and reports

In addition to these features, study results that have been saved in a latest design version can also be shared, viewed, and marked up by team members within the design’s detail page on A360 via the web browser, making easier to communicate and collaborate on the go.

Expect a couple new tutorials (YouTube as well as in-product) around testing and simulation after our update goes live! Live Review

You’ve asked for it, and we’re making it happen. Daniel touched on this in our new A360 invitation post where the 3D web viewer now gives you the ability to start a live review session with anyone and see each other’s interactions with the model in real-time. This new update will expand on this feature and allow Fusion 360 client to web live review sessions between 2 or multiple people at any given time.

Modeling edits made within Fusion 360 during a live review session will be reflected in the web session in real-time. If you are one driving the design from the client, you can give permission to reviewers to interact with the design, and you’ll see it update within your Fusion 360 design environment.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Another feature that has been highly voted on in our IdeaStation has been keyboard shortcuts. Charles discussed our ideas around how we want to implement it here, and we’re excited to release this first phase of keyboard shortcuts with a set of keys focused on basic modeling tools.

Command

Key

Extrude

E

Hole

H

Press Pull

Q

Fillet

F

Move

M

Toggle Visibility

V

Toggle Component Color Cycling

N

Appearance

A

Compute All

Command + B or Ctrl + B

Joint

J

As-built Joint

Shift + J

Line

L

2-point Rectangle

R

Center Diameter Circle

C

Trim

T

Offset

O

Measure

I

Project

P

Normal / Construction

X

Sketch Dimension

D

Scripts and Add-ins

Shift + S

Window Selection

1

Freeform Selection

2

Paint Selection

3

You will soon be able to trigger commands based on their respective keys, and move quickly from one command to the other. The gif below shows Line, Sketch Dimension, Press Pull, and Fillet all triggered by keyboard shortcut keys.

Drawings

In this update, we’ve improved stability and usability of the 2D drawings workspace and will also be introducing the ability to:

Create fully associative centerlines and center-marks

Align and renumber balloons

Parts list reverse ordering (bottom to top)

Restore default properties to annotations

Modeling, Sketching, Stability, and Performance

Another popular ask that we’re delivering on is the ability to pattern components.

Within the solid pattern commands such as rectangular pattern, circular pattern, and pattern on path, you’ll see the option to pattern components as one of the pattern types. Simply click that you’ll have your components patterned in no time.

We’ve also made significant strides on the stability front, especially stability within the sketching environment. Over 40+ sketch related bugs and issues have been fixed, including issues that were causing crashes, unpredictable compute behavior in Variable Fillet and Combine, and sketching performance has noticeably become faster and more stable.

We’re really excited about this update, and hope you are too. We’ll keep you posted as we gear up for the release scheduled for next Saturday. Stay tuned!

LMD001

abender33

Very excited for this release, especially the simulation aspects. Any word for other types of simulation such as heat? Is design optimization (where certain dimensions can be varied through iterations to achieve a goal) in the pipeline?

abender33

@keqingsong﻿ Yes! I absolutely use both of those aspects in my design. More so the heat analysis, as a lot of the work I do involves electronics, and ensuring that their enclosures provide adequate cooling. Either way, keep up the excellent work!

urban_harrysson

Regarding thermal analysis it would be useful to have the possibility to make transient analysis. Transient analysis gives a more realistic result compared to a static analysis. For example the most dominant stresses in a jet engine occur during take of when the outer shell of the engine get hot before the core of the engine. This will cause a thermal expansion of the outer core while the core still is cold. This is the case for many everyday designs. An other example would be the thermal behavior of a 3D-printer nozzle that extrude plastic. There are many empirical designs being made and an thermal analysis would improve the understanding of the design.

In order to use the thermal results for stress calculations the temperature and resulting thermal expansion it would be necessary to be able to do a combined analysis of thermal followed by a stress at given time intervals.

An analysis is only as good as the boundary conditions. For thermal analysis the heat flow in and out of a part is often controlled by a heat transfer coefficient from air or fluid. The simplest but still very useful condition is to have a heat transfer coefficient and a bulk temperature on the boundaries.

The capability to do transient analysis would be very useful to me. On the other hand I regard static thermal analysis as almost useless. I have worked with air and space engines for 15 years and designing 3D-printer for 20 years. The stress and modal analysis combined with a transient thermal capability in fusion 360 would make the software complete for me.

Best Regards and thank you for the good work!

21652157

rogerfries

Absolutely amazing to have FEA analysis at this level of affordibabity!!! The Keyboard shortcuts are a must. This software is awesome!!! My only question is will the advanced features like FEA remain in the $300 a year tier? Or is this a teaser that get’s pulled to a higher pricing tier just when I learn how to use it? I really love what you guys are building! I’m a Geomagic convert, while Geomagic is a fine CAD software, having built in CAM is awesome!

@rogerfries﻿ No bait and switch here! Linear Static Stress, Modal, Thermal and Thermal stress will all be part of Fusion 360 at the base level. Even more advance functionality will make its way into Ultimate.

We are doing the update right now. I’m really looking forward to your feedback.

daniel_lyall

rogerfries

Amazing! I can’t wait to try taking a few of my project designs to seejust how much extra steel I used! I think many of us “Garage engineers”overbuild beyond any practical load, just because “My machine ain’t gonnabreak”. Obviously there will be some learning curve here, but this couldbe a total game changer for me and my designs. No doubt real engineers cancalculate these loads in their sleep, but my only training is High schoolmachine shop back in the early 80’s and I work as an IT guy in luxury goodscompany. I build things just for fun. I’m thrilled to have such qualityCAD/CAM software available at a home shop price point! I hope you guys canmake some money on this product because I want to keep this going!